Temporary And Structural Angst Brew Up a Tempest

TW: I think Cassidy hits the nail pretty squarely here. The above graph shows regardless of the to and fro about individuals, any POTUS suffers or flies high depending upon economic circumstances. Then when one overlays economic angst with a strategic shift in America's role in the world (see below) one gets the tempest currently brewing in the U.S. Furthermore, this strategic shift goes beyond matters of international power and prestige but encompasses evolving demographics as well, which leads cultural attributes previously taken as a given being questioned. The incumbents are fighting like hell for the "good old days". Although why those at the CPAC conference would suddenly feel good about dragging the still cold political corpse of Dick Cheney out of his figurative casket surprises me.

From John Cassidy at New Yorker"
"...Another factor, which rarely gets mentioned, but which appears obvious to people who didn’t grow up [in the US], such as myself, is that many Americans reach adulthood with a set of values and sense of self-identity that is historically inaccurate and potentially dangerous. If you have it banged into your head from the cradle to adolescence that America is the chosen nation—a country built by a rugged and God-fearing band of Anglo-Saxon individualists armed with pikes and long guns—you are less likely to embrace other essential features of the American heritage, such as the church-state divide, mass immigration, and the essential role of the federal government in the country’s economic and political development. When things are going well, and Team USA is squashing its rivals, this cognitive dissonance is kept in check. But when “the Homeland” encounters a rough patch and its manifest destiny is called into question, the underlying tensions and contradictions in the American psyche come to the fore, and people rail against the government.

Not all Americans are subject to this unfortunate mental condition, of course. Many, perhaps most, of our citizens are pragmatic, open-minded, and justifiably proud of the nation’s cultural and ethnic diversity. But at any period of time, there is a certain segment of the population—a quarter, perhaps—that provides fertile ground for what Richard Hofstadter, back in 1964, called the “paranoid style” of American politics, which trades in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

All countries have some disaffected folk, of course. But the real danger to any democracy comes when military conflict or economic dislocation swells the ranks of the permanently alienated with legions of people who are temporarily disadvantaged or angry. And that, I think, is what is happening now..."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/02/tea-party-usa.html

Net net this fresh Toles cartoon sums up much of the current political realities: